Things about Google+

Some thoughts about Google+.

First the simple one. I understand / appreciate Twitter’s simplicity a lot more now. It only does one thing. You don’t need to keep track of notifications and posts and tags and checkins and comments. You just read the timeline till you get bored or catch up.

Secondly, on an Android phone, with the Plus app installed, I’m now able to share my photos and comments, and links, you name it, into Plus from the system-wide Share menu, using any application on the system that supported sharing. On my iPhone, I need to wait for the G+ API to be released, then for all of the applications I use to individually invent and implement their own seperate ways of adding a “share to Google+” button, then for Apple to approve new releases of all their software, then I have to upgrade them all on my phone.

One of the reasons that Apple makes products with such nice experiences is because they control the stack from the hardware level right up to the applications on the phone. Everything works together. But that’s where Apple’s work stops – all the applications are (intentionally) silos that don’t / can’t talk to each other. The assumption is that once you have an application to do a thing, you’re finished. To do a different thing, use a different application.

Google’s management / control doesn’t reach down as far as the hardware, or even the OS layer (as the operators / manufacturers can do a lot of things to the platform in the name of differentiation), so Android suffers from a framgmentation problem at those levels. But at the network ecosystem level, they’re stronger than Apple – all of their internet products play together reasonably well. It’s not great, but it’s decent. Google+ can recommend contacts from my address book, or because I’ve sent them mail in the past. It can use the profile I already had. I can use photos that are already in Picassa in my posts without me having to faff (if I used picassa..).

Android has better Share support because Android is a platform that understands the Internet, whereas iOS stops at the Application layer. If you care about having nice applications, iOS is better, because everything about it is aimed at having nice applications. But in the next version of iOS, Apple might manage to ship system-wide support for Twitter, just as everyone I know stops caring.

—

(Related – when I get a notification on iOS that I have a new @reply tweet, or a new message on some service, it’s merely a notification. I have to launch the app to see what it is. If I’m underground when I see the notification, then I’m just stuffed. On Android, I’ll have the notification because the app already has the data. When I lived in Berlin, this didn’t matter, because you can get decent data everywhere, even on the u-bahn. In London, data is a lot spottier, and it’s changing the importance I put on offline support and background-fetching of data.)